The Song of the Wolf

by Frank Mayer

And ten feet away, with his sightless eyes staring up at the blue sky, his shirt still smouldering from a powder burn above his heart, lay Matlock, still clutching the Mauser in his stiffening hand.

Douglass, on dismounting, had picketed the horses and thrown himself at full length on the grass with his head in Constance's lap. She had temporarily regained dominion over him and was deliriously happy in consequence, lavishing upon him all the tenderness of her really unselfish affection. With tact she induced him to talk of his earlier life and its vicissitudes, and in the relation he was so frank and confiding that he was invested with a new glory in her sight. Of his amours he was considerately reticent, his innate chivalry prompting him to repress anything which would give her pain, and she was wise enough to refrain from any embarrassing questions. Their communion was intimate, and she had not been so happy in many months.

Then by some unfortunate vagary she chanced to refer to his first difficulty with Matlock, asking him for the real facts in the case, and the man crouched in the clematis gnashed his teeth at Douglass's contemptuous reflections upon his cowardice.

"Oh, I took no particular risk," Douglass said carelessly; "the man was not only a cowardly cur, but a blundering fool as well, as was plainly shown in his foolish sale of that apex mine. Why, he might just as well have got the million out of it that I did, if he had been honest and only ordinarily intelligent. I knew the vein was there all the time, and I really think he had a suspicion of it. But his great mistake was his insane hatred of me, and he bungled his revenge badly. He really thought he was cleverly swindling me, when the fact was that he was playing directly into my hand."

He laughed scornfully and drew down the fair head to his.

"Let us forget about the fool. I had sworn to kill him once, but now that he was unconsciously the cause of all my good fortune I feel only pity for him."

Over in the clematis the sun was gleaming on a polished tube of steel that was leveled directly at his heart, the eyes aligned along its sights malignant with insane fury. But the finger crooked about the trigger was restrained by a fiendish thought and with a chuckle Matlock waited.

The distance was absurdly short and at that range he could clip the head of a match. Just two more inches of elevation of that hated head and he could send the jacketed bullet shearing just through the bridge of the aquiline nose, splitting both eyeballs and blinding his enemy for the little space of life he would thereafter accord him. It would be passing sweet to have that helpless, sightless thing listen unseeingly to his maltreatment of the woman.

At that moment his horse, which had been picketed some distance away in the brush, discovered the presence of the two horses in the glade and gave a loud whinny of salutation. Douglass was on his feet in a second, his hand upon his revolver butt. The presence of another horse in that cañon was a suspicious thing and as he inclined his head toward the direction from which the whinny had come, his sharp eye discerned the gleam in the clematis.

Instantly the gun leaped from its scabbard, but in the moment of its release there came a faint haze from the leafy screen, a sharp report, and Douglass pitched forward, face down, beside the little spring, the revolver falling from his nerveless hand directly into the lap of the screaming woman.